Working name of Indian-born academic and editor Thomas A Shippey (1943- ), in the UK from childhood; Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature at the University of Leeds 1979-1993; held the Walter J Ong Chair of Humanities at St Louis University 1993-2008. In essays and reviews, which he has been publishing since the mid-1970s, he takes a clear-headed orthodox view of the central figures of sf and fantasy; Fictional Space: Essays on Contemporary Science Fiction (coll 1991) assembles some of this work. The Road to Middle-Earth (1982) and J R R Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000) are studies of J R R Tolkien, the latter featuring a hilarious exposé of the inadequacies of academic critics when they attempt to explain away the author's astonishing success. Shippey also edited The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories (anth 1992), in the Introduction to which he espouses James Bradley's notion that sf is a literature whose central image is "the creator of artefacts" or Homo "fabril"; a second anthology, The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories (anth 1994), was more carefully put together. Shippey cowrote the theme entries on Magic and History in SF in this encyclopedia. He has also written short sf under the pseudonym Tom Allen, and the Hammer and Cross sequence, beginning with The Hammer and the Cross (1993), all as by John Holm, with Harry Harrison, who see for details. He won an IAFA Award as Distinguished Guest Scholar in 1996. [JC]

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We passed a couple of major milestones on 1st August: the SFE is now over 4.5 million words, of which John Clute’s own contribution has now exceeded 2 million. (For comparison, the 1993 second edition was 1.3 million words, and … Continue reading →

We’ve reached a couple of milestones recently. The SFE gallery of book covers now has more than 10,000 images: this one seemed appropriate for the 10,000th. Our series of slideshows of thematically linked covers has continued to grow, and Darren Nash of … Continue reading →

We’ve been talking for a while about new features to add to the SFE, and another one has gone live today: the Gallery, which collects together covers for sf books and links them back to SFE entries. To quote from … Continue reading →